A year of work in progress – day 62 (Cakes)

Day 62 – 3 April 2014 Day 61 and day 3 of the A to Z Blogging Challenge.

I like baking cakes. I think that I’m quite good at it, I’m certainly better at them than I am with pastry.

We have a cake club at work #cakeclub. Actually there are three of us who bake at the weekend and share recipes but you have to start somewhere. Mark, Kelly and I are planning a bake off for the Macmillan coffee morning later on in the year. If you want to join in please do.

I like baking as it is an escape from my more cerebral pastimes. I like the way that by mixing a small number of ingredients and subjecting them to heat they turn into something wonderful to eat. It is alchemy. I get gold out of base flour, butter, eggs and sugar. I marvel at the inventiveness of people and wonder how the first person ever realised that by mixing products together they could create a cake.

My favourite cakes use ground almonds.

I also like the fact that sometimes they turn out wrong and that I can learn to improve them by trying again. Sometimes they burn at the edges as my oven runs hot so I manage a lower heat and cover the cake with foil for the first half of the bake. Sometimes they are too sweet or too greasy or don’t rise and I can resolve these by adjusting the ingredients.

I guess that’s the learning point. There is a parallel between baking and work. Not everything works and you use those lessons to try again, tweaking the environment, altering the ingredients and changing the recipe. Good cakes require dedication, love and attention but then don’t we all.

This morning I was off over hill and down dale for a broadband task and finish group meeting in Weardale. Durham is a beautiful county but the weather protected its modesty. We haven’t seen the sun here for a couple of weeks but at least we are not suffering from dust like the troubled south of England. It was a good meeting with lots of questions. We are underway now.

Next it was back in the car to drive further up the dale. I’d been promising to pop in and see Mike at Kilhope Mining Museum (our remotest location by far) for some time. They’ve always struggled with connectivity but being high up in the hills at the top of Weardale and surrounded by lead was always going to present a challenge. I’ll keep the detail until I get to K.

Then it was back over the top of the moors in the fog to Newcastle for a preparation meeting for the for the Dynamo14 conference on 1 May. I’ll be one of the speakers, in a break-out session, and so far over three hundred delegates have registered to come. There is a really exciting ICT vibe going on in the region and it feels good to be a part of it.

Learning points for today: Let them eat cake; I’m starting to look like Carl Marx; the moors in the fog are a scary place and; the North East is a lively place to be in.

Today’s enjoyment rating 9/10 – a little stressed.